Midterm Madness

I believe that most of my friend group is suffering from midterm madness, a terrifying yet unavoidable disease.

Symptoms include the inability to focus while studying, a desire to consume more food than usual, and an excessive amount of internet surfing. Insomnia or excessive sleeping can both occur.

It's definitely midterms time. It seems like everyone I know has a midterm or two creeping up on them. For me, the terrifying one is my Japanese history midterm - 1500+ years of history to remember, and all - which means that I've been putting in some serious study-party time. Yesterday and today, a group of us got together to review all of the primary-source readings, the handouts, and the textbook readings.

However, we were studying perhaps 55% of the time. The other portion of time was spent making cracks about Prince Shotoku's excessively complimentary historical portrayal ("So what did Prince Fabulous do NOW?"), or about changing power structures ("Shugo-daimyo already knows four moves. Shugo-daimyo did not learn LOYALTY TO EMPEROR."), or about Japanese vocabulary ("'These Buddhist nuns were called bikuni.' 'Wait, bikinis?' 'Well, you have to gain the illiterate townsfolk's attention somehow.'"). We also made a much-needed study trip into town, where we ate Chinese food and talked about potential essay questions (and chopstick etiquette)

All in all, we probably got less studying done than we could have if we had been going at it on our own, but we did get some necessary stress relief.

In other news, the applications to be a tour guide for Oberlin have come out; I'm finding it tough to fill out some sections... None of my teachers have posted grades yet, so I don't have any idea what my official GPA is, for example. I hope that won't be too much of a problem... I would dearly love to be a tour guide and spend my time babbling effusively at potential Obies. My fingers are crossed.

Settling into Routines

It's been a pretty quiet couple of days. I spent the last weekend doing homework - an abnormally repetitive, tedious econ problem set and a thirty-page reading that I had to prepare a discussion for - and avoiding the overtly friendly bees that came out to enjoy the sunshine we got Sunday. I'm pretty sure the bees here can sense who they will freak out most if they land on.

Several days after it first fell off, our doorknob is still broken. I managed to screw it back on, but it's still not turning properly... Our work order has been changed to "in progress," but honestly, I don't know what the policy is for work order fulfillment here. Do Roommate or I have to be in the room all the time? We're hoping that they call before they come to help us out.

The question that's been waiting on my mind lately is what I'll be doing over Oberlin's week-long fall break. Most people go home, or travel (the school sponsors service trips, and a local bus company runs shuttles to NYC, Boston, and Chicago). The dining halls shut down for Fall Break, the library closes at 5 PM, and so people tend to get the heck out of dodge: Oberlin is not an exciting town if there's no concerts/comedy shows/movie screenings. It's still a nice town, but it's also a town with a three-block-by-three-block downtown.

One of my friends here is an international student, and so has made puppy-dog eyes to get me to stay over the break with her so that we can cook and hang out together to alleviate that boredom. I've been invited to another friend's house a few hours away for Thanksgiving, so I'm thinking that I'll stay here over the fall break. Perhaps I can use this time to get some sewing done for Sakura-Con at home in Seattle, or Halloween. I don't know what Halloween is like out here, but I'll be disappointed if there's not a huge fanfare about it - this campus is full of artsy, creative people whose favorite holiday is likely Halloween. I'm personally hoping for inter-dorm trick-or-treating and the chance of costumed adventures. Halloween parties with college kids will likely lead to a whole bunch of drunk people, so I'm not planning on going to anything of that sort.

Other than this Fall Break question, my life has been reasonably quiet these last few days, just going to classes, doing homework, and occasionally meeting to tutor a local high school kid. Perhaps it's because I ran with the geeky IB kids in high school and am going to an intellectual, geeky college, but I find myself frustrated that this student isn't willing to put in the effort to catch up himself. I have to keep reminding myself that patience is a virtue, and that I am getting paid to be helpful - even when he doesn't know the difference between a consonant and a vowel at age seventeen. (What kind of elementary schools do they have around here if a kid doesn't know what vowels are? AIUEO, Y?)

On that note, the tutoring is the only job I've managed to find so far - it seems like a lot of the on-campus places like the library tend to hire at the end of the first semester and train during spring semester. I'm told that being a tour guide for the admissions office works the same way. I'm hoping that I can get into the ranks of the tour guides, because I love talking about Oberlin and how fantastic it is, but as of right now, I'm mooching money off my parents for groceries. The money I made from my first tutoring session got put towards my copy of the Avengers movie, but having some more "fun money" to go into the reopened town movie theater ($5 tickets, a shock for this girl who's used to $9 or $10) or go out to dinner would be appreciated.

Many of the jobs that are listed on the Oberlin classifieds website specify that they only hire or only pay federal work-study students, but my financial aid package didn't include that. It's a bit frustrating - I would dearly love to work, but the jobs that I've applied for haven't even had the courtesy to send me a "thanks but no thanks" email. I'm hoping that next semester I'll be able to find something.

First-Year Dorm Adventures

Today is Yom Kippur, so Oberlin gave us all the day off (hooray!). One of my friends and I have plans to go out for lunch and spend the day watching Avatar: The Last Airbender and do absolutely no homework whatsoever.

However... I got up and did dishes this morning, and when I pulled my dorm door shut behind me, the doorknob fell off.

Our door hasn't been shutting properly for a few days now, and I think I know why - the screws that hold the outside knob on the door have become so worn that they're starting to become loose. I've already tightened them three times since we've been living here (thanks for the screwdriver, Daddy), but at this point, they're not doing much good. Roomie and I will have to put in a work order for our poor overworked doorknob. Perhaps while we're at it, we'll get them to fix our light fixture, which is currently being held together by a copious amount of packing tape. I'm now understanding the logic behind these cinderblock walls: they're pretty much impervious to damage, unlike everything else in the room.

The joys of living in a first-year dorm.

Just a Normal Saturday Night at Oberlin

Last night, I came back from dinner a bit late and found my hall full of people. This in itself is a tad unusual, because (generally speaking) my hallmates and I do not spend our time hanging out in the hallways; they're narrow and sort of dimly lit.

Most of the people - other students from the world cultures wing - were in drag. I thought I had missed some obvious campus event, Drag Ball or a Rocky Horror screening.

Nope.

They were going drag bowling for the heck of it. Several of my hallmates left wearing my shoes (being a girl with size 11 feet does come in handy when your male-bodied friends need heels) or accessories.

Needless to say, with that whole shebang going on, coupled with yesterday's Culture Festival, I got very little work done last night. However, the cultural festival was fantastic, and I really enjoyed it. Most of the cultural groups on campus, plus some non-cultural groups (Oberlin Slow Food? I suppose it could be argued that local-food supporters are a subculture...) set up tables around the main green area on campus, Tappan Square.

Most of the tables had an activity (making crafts, doing calligraphy, et cetera) for the local children that came. It's when the college hosts activities like this that I truly appreciate how the town and the school function together; many of the area's families come to college-sponsored events.

There was also a ton of food. The German House table had four or five different varieties of cake, the French House table had crepes, there was a line thirty people long for Indian food, and one of the Spanish tables had samples of sprinkle-covered frosting balls. I don't know whose idea it was to take frosting and roll it in sprinkles and call it a Spanish dessert, but they were so tooth-achingly sweet I could feel cavities forming.

One of my friends, Emma-from-Asia-House, and I dressed up for the cultural festival; it was the first time I've gotten a  chance to wear kimono out here in Ohio and I took it, getting both of us dressed up and looking fabulous. We got a lot of attention from the various people attending the festival, had several photos taken of us, and impressed our Japanese teacher.

It stayed nice for the first hour and a half or two hours of the festival, while the Oberlin College Taiko group performed and then the Chinese Student Association did a lion dance demonstration. It started to sprinkle a bit as our little group was winding down, so Asia House Emma, Emma-from-my-hall, and I came back to my dorm room. Asia House Emma and I got undressed, a much faster undertaking than getting dressed in kimono is, and the three of us watched BBC's Sherlock until we had to go to dinner.

I should have been responsible - I do have a paper due tomorrow as well as a load of other homework - but instead I chose to spend my day gallivanting around campus and town. I don't regret it, because I know I can still get everything done, I'm just feeling a little crunched for time now!

Workload, Class Structures, and Why I love IB In Retrospect: An Examination of College Academic Life

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I have a grand total of sixty minutes of class, plus my anally-retentive early arrivals. When I first got my schedule, I was elated, and then realized that this was probably kind of stupid - after all, college classes are supposed to be harder, require more reading, and have more outside work than high school.

I don't see it. I feel like my workload is actually fairly similar to what I had in high school (minus the late nights at school hunched over Adobe InDesign for yearbook work). It's just the kind of work that differs.

My workload by class breaks down something like this:

• Japanese (in class MTWTF, an hour a day): Roughly a half hour to forty minutes of kanji, grammar, vocab, and/or worksheets. If there's a project to do, I might spend up to an hour and a half on this subject. This doesn't include the once-weekly required conversation practice or time spent at the Japanese table during lunch.
• History (in class MWF, an hour a day): Roughly two hours of reading, broken up into "What's Due Monday" done over the weekend and "What's Due Wednesday or Friday" done on Tuesday or Thursday. This involves highlighting, annotating, and thinking up questions for our class discussion. Coming up with good discussion questions has been rather absurdly easy; I think of what a research question for a history IA would be. If I have a project due in class, I might spend an extra hour or two on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but so far, we haven't had a major hours-in-the-library research paper yet. 
• Economics (in class MW, an hour and fifteen minutes a day): Roughly an hour of reading, plus the "problem sets" (perhaps two hours each) that are due every week or so. Also, I spend fifteen minutes or so rereading my notes from the previous classes.
• "First-Year Seminar" (in class MW, an hour and fifteen minutes a day): Two hours of reading, give or take, with discussion questions/notes/annotations involved in that. The papers that I've had to write so far have taken me three to four hours to finish.
• SexCo (in class Wednesdays, two hours a week): Two to three hours of reading, plus the counseling-training sessions that usually last about an hour a week. 

I credit IB with making a good deal of this seem easier than I expected. I know how to skim readings, how to go back and find the important bits, how to recognize key names and take good notes. I'm not afraid to find people and ask for help. For a first-year college student, my writing is clear and decent. Because I spent my last two years of high school in a high-pressure environment, I already know how I study most effectively, when I'm at my best for writing papers, and during what times I'm most useless (1:30-2:30 PM and anytime after 2 AM, for reference. Knowing these times means that I can schedule my homework and such more efficiently.)

What I'm finding is that I'm not having trouble with the same things I did in high school - I'm not overscheduled (yet) and so I do all the readings for my classes on time and thoroughly. I spend time reviewing and discussing outside class for reasons other than frantic last-minute scrambles at the lunch table.

Instead, the class that I'm having trouble in is the one I expected to be easy. The Japanese curriculum is different here, with a greater emphasis placed on casual language. I'm not comfortable speaking casually, so I'm feeling a little stilted when I try to speak. The class also moves at a much more rapid pace, to the point where there is a quiz every day or so, and the kanji/vocabulary we're assigned comes in larger quantities. I feel bad about wasting so many index cards on my obsessive flash-card making (I cut them into fourths to minimize my impact).

It's a strange feeling, the classic "little fish in a big pond" scenario. Everyone here is quite intelligent, and the impact of the whole "beginning-a-language-in-college" thing is pretty obvious. I've decided that the biggest difference between high school and college so far is the pace at which this language class moves; the people who took their first year of Japanese here seem to have no trouble keeping up. To put this in perspective, I took four years of Japanese in high school and was placed into a 201 class here. My high school classes feel like they were being played in slow motion in comparison.

In high school, I led our Japanese club and was asked to be the student speaker at the Japanese National Honor Society induction. It's safe to say that I thought I was good at this! Now that I'm here, seeing little notes like "ii desu!" ("it's good!") on my tests is killing me, because all I see is the mistakes marked in red Xs.

Effectively, I'm learning firsthand what so many people say about college - you will be challenged, even at things that used to come easily to you. It's starting to get a little disheartening, because I admit it's difficult to be knocked down a peg or two regarding your favorite subject, but it's also kind of motivating. The structure of the language class is similar in effect, although not in pace, to high school; I'm not finding this to be the case with my other classes.

In many (perhaps even most) high schools/high school classes, grading is heavily weighted toward daily homework. In most of my classes senior year, daily homework "completeness points" or "stamp points" made up about forty to fifty percent of the grade you received. Larger projects accounted for another twenty percent, a midterm and final five to ten percent each, and, depending on the teacher, perhaps some other category would be thrown in.

A college grade schematic tends toward a breakdown of homework at 20%, one or two midterms at 20% each, and a final at perhaps 40%. Actual figures can waver according to the class itself, and occasionally there will be another category (my history class actually does consider "participation" as a grading point), but this is pretty average as far as I can tell.

The homework for my econ class, which has the exact figures listed above, is given as seven "problem sets" over the course of the semester; they're usually five or six problems long. What that means is that thirty-five to fifty problems will determine twenty percent of my grade. Thirty-five to fifty problems in high school is sometimes only two or three days' worth of homework. Each problem matters more.

What this means is that it's far easier to do poorly in college than in high school; I feel grade pressure here a bit more than I did in high school because my undergraduate GPA will determine my grad school prospects. However, at this point I'm just trying to keep in mind that no one will be perfect during their first semester of college, and that some adjustment is necessary as well as normal.

My advice? I see my roommate struggling with subjects she's not fond of because she wanted to get distribution requirements out of the way early. I agree to a certain extent with that philosophy (if you're writing your honors thesis in history in your fourth year and also taking a boring physics class, for example, I would assume that those two would conflict and one would suffer), but at the same time, I knew that coming to college would require an adjustment on my part and chose classes that I would enjoy. This meant a really social-science heavy first semester, but it's also things that I'm comfortable with.

It's like choosing what clothes to bring to college: a little reinvention of your personal style is totally fine, and even a good thing, but if you go from jeans to formalwear, you likely won't be comfortable in the new duds. Having the familiarity of favorite subjects is somewhat reassuring when so much else in your life is changing.

On Making Friends

I suppose the "making friends" aspect of college is less intimidating if you're going to a school with people you know from high school. I didn't have this benefit, and I'm quite shy, so the concept of "making friends" with random people honestly scared me. The last few days have shown me why this is slightly ridiculous, and reinforced some basic truths about How to Make Friends when you're tossed onto a new campus with new people.

1. Be yourself. This is so cheesy, but it's so effective... One of the people I've made friends with this week came up and talked to me after she saw my computer background (one of the Equalist posters from the Legend of Korra), and we proceeded to spend the afternoon in my dorm, trading fandoms and series that we thought the other should watch/read. Another person I've been growing closer to mentioned My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic within my earshot, I piped into the conversation, and we're now friends.

This tactic works best if you're a geek of some sort. Being fans of the same TV shows, manga, movies, webcomics, something like that - it provides a source of conversation so you don't endlessly cycle around to "so how were your classes today?" It also takes a little bit of pressure off, because your fellow first-years will usually be feeling the same sense of awkwardness regarding small talk.

2. Go to things that interest you. This afternoon, the college hosted a lecture by Peter Kornicki, who is head of East Asian Studies at Cambridge University (yeah, that Cambridge) about 17th and 18th century Japanese books. It was brilliant, and going to that gave me an opportunity to meet other students who are willing to give up their Tuesday afternoons to listen to someone talking about woodblock-cut printing. That sort of thing also provides conversation topics! If you're interested in something (politics, random academic topics, astronomy, LGBTQ rights...) your college will likely have a student group for it. If they don't, you can start one - advertise on notice boards, any online classifieds your school runs, the newspaper (if they have a section for things like this).

3. Leave your dorm door open. Our door is heavy and swings forward with the teensiest breeze ever, so the first thing we bought was a doorstop. Especially if you're living in a first-year dorm, people will just sort of wave at you as they pass, and some of the more adventurous ones will stop and talk.

4. Ask questions. Yesterday, before my economics class, I mentioned as an aside that I had done IB in high school. The girl in front of me whipped around, asked me for my EE topic, and we had a ten-minute conversation on the merits and drawbacks of IB in our respective home countries. If she hadn't asked me what my EE was, I doubt I would have talked to her.

Even if you're painfully shy, ask the person sitting near you where they're from, what dorm they're living in, why they're taking that class... No one will get irritated at you for talking to them.



What this sums up to is the simple fact that it's pretty difficult to NOT make friends during college. In the first few days, during orientation, there will be people who seem to just click into a large group that eats together, sits together during orientation events, and goes partying together. If you're not into that scene, wait until after your classes have started to worry about Not Having Friends. Theoretically, you're in at least one class that interests you - use that as a starting point for friendships. 

"Is The Homesickness Setting In Yet?"

When I first started this blog, I didn't intend to make it quite as Oberlin-centric as the past few posts have been; instead, I wanted to discuss the challenges and benefits of being far away from home during the "college experience." One of the things that I wished I had found in the college search was an account of what I could expect from the first year of college. There seems to be so much written about how to get into college, but the amount of material on the college adjustment is left to books like The Naked Roommate or individual forum posts.

I Skyped my best friend today. She's living at home and going to school at a state college, and we're both feeling the distance... I used to be three blocks away, now it's two thousand miles. I don't know what I would do without Skype, cell phones, and texting to keep up with my close friends and my parents at home.

Even so, when I was talking to my best friend and her mom popped by to ask whether I was missing home, I didn't know what to say. Perhaps this is because I've usually been okay with sleep-away camps/traveling without my parents, but I've never really gotten homesick. In the last few days, I've kept a little more to myself. I can't say that I'm homesick exactly, but my cat, my parents, my friends... I'm feeling the absence more than usual.

Today especially - my hall made dumplings in the tiny dorm kitchen, and I couldn't help but compare the action of cooking in Dascomb to cooking at home. I missed the counter space and the gas stove from my kitchen, as well as having access to little things like large-sized kitchen knives to shred cabbage with.

Yet even with my slightly-more-melancholy attitude these last few days, I'm not homesick. I miss home, but I'm not desperate to return. I think one of the reasons I've been feeling a little down lately is the amount of stuff I'm not doing: because I've had papers to write and homework to do, this weekend has consisted largely of me sitting in my dorm room or in the library, procrastinating. In those moments of not being busy, I focus more on how I used to do homework on the couch with my cat sleeping on my feet.

My solution for this is continuing to be busy. I'm watching more movies, re-reading books - anything so that I'm not just surfing the internet looking at Maru videos. If you're in the same situation I was a year ago - applying to colleges across the nation but worrying about the separation all the same - then all I can say is yes, you will miss home. However, missing home is manageable - talk to your parents for twenty minutes a day between classes or after dinner, text your friends when you wake up so that they have a message waiting for them when they get up (although this only works if you're further east than your friends), find a place in town to go when you need a kitten to cuddle.

It's normal to miss home. It's also normal to be off gallivanting around your fascinating new campus. Striking a balance is the hard part.

Five Really Awesome People Talk Politics and Media

Tonight, I went to the first "convocation" of the semester, which was a discussion moderated by President Krislov between four Oberlin alums who are currently working as journalists covering the 2012 election. There was some pretty big names here - Peter Baker, the current White House correspondent for the New York Times and Michael Duffy, one of the executive editors/writers for TIME - and they spent several hours discussing the impact of social media on the campaign, their views on the changing journalism field, and the implications of recent events abroad on the foreign-policy area of the campaign.

I was a yearbook editor in high school, not a newspaper kid, and I made that choice based on my graphic design affinity (and not having enough time to do both). However, journalism is journalism whether it's in newsprint or glossy hardbacks, and I really wished that some of my friends from school who were also interested in the field could have come. If I, with limited experience or knowledge of the inner workings of the journalism world, enjoyed it so much, I know others would have gotten even more out of the discussion.

I found the talk fascinating, personally. Coming from a consistently Democratic state (to the irritation of much of the Eastern half), I haven't experienced elections in a swing state before. I definitely notice the change - my Hulu ads are becoming more and more politically-oriented, instead of advertising cereal or cars. When I pass by the lounge and people are watching TV, I can hear snippets of the back-and-forth ads. One of the points that was brought up tonight was the fact that no Republican has ever taken the White House without Ohio, and how vital this makes Ohio to the Romney campaign. The other topic that was discussed regarding the presidential campaign here in Ohio was the smaller percentage of currently undecided voters, meaning that more money and time is being focused on less people at the moment.

There have been several times since I've arrived on campus that I've doubted my decision to keep my Washington voter registration as an absentee voter. Honestly, the only reason I'm keeping my Washington registration is Ref. 74, "the same-sex marriage referendum" - if that issue wasn't on the ballot in my beloved home state, I would be signed up to vote out here already. Because Washington is a reliably blue state, I feel like my single vote here in the presidential race would matter more, but I'm held back by my desire to see Ref. 74 passed. Also, canceling registration in Washington involves forms that need to be signed, and that's a lot of kerfuffle to deal with when I have several papers due in the next two weeks.

In a roundabout sort of way, what I'm saying here is that I definitely observe the political interest and activism that Oberlin is famous for. I can see why this school has become such a social-justice hotbed, given its location in a swing state and notoriously liberal student body. The Oberlin Democrats are a large and vocal group on campus, whereas the campus Republican group flies below the radar (I didn't know we had one until I looked at the student organization list online. The Dems put up signs, have tables everywhere to register students to vote, and have interest meetings with food.)

Tonight, though, really encompassed a lot of what I love about this school - a fantastic organ performance by one of the Con students followed by a good deal of intellectual, interesting, and sometimes funny discourse by respected individuals, which ended with them answering questions from the student body. As I walked back to Home Sweet Dascomb, I could hear someone practicing a percussion instrument, perhaps one of the ExCos like Steel Drums or Taiko.

It was a good way to spend a Thursday evening.

My Oberlin Geekiness is Showing

Sunday night, I went to a meeting about hosting prospective students, or "prospies." I find this sort of ironic, as I didn't do an overnight stay at Oberlin. (I did do an overnight stay at another small midwest lib-arts college, but that school and Oberlin were pretty different.) The reason(s) I didn't do an overnight here: When I visited Oberlin prior to being admitted, I was on a ridiculously tight schedule in which I attempted to visit Grinnell, Oberlin, and Beloit in about four days over a school break. After admissions decisions are made, Oberlin hosts an influx of admitted high school students in an event called "All Roads Lead to Oberlin." I elected not to come on All Roads because I didn't want to put the financial pressure on my parents (plane tickets are expensive) and also because I had fallen in love with Oberlin harder than anywhere else, based solely on my whirlwind admissions-office tour, meal in the dining hall, and exploratory poke around the town.

Based on that, I find it funny that I'm so excited about hosting prospies. I don't know what people /do/ on Oberlin overnights, aside from eating in a dining hall and sleeping on the floor of their dorm. Roomie and I decided that I was in a good position to host for the college because we've got a decent amount of floor space, and she'll occasionally have sports-related prospies, so we'd just have to coordinate when we were having an overnight guest. I suppose I'll just have to scan the bulletin boards on campus extra-hard a few days before I host; there's so much going on this campus that I have a hard time keeping track of it sometimes. I can't imagine how intense it'll seem to a prospective student go have a band at the 'Sco, a Oberlin Dems interest meeting, a concert by a couple of Connies, movie screenings, plays, and games of Ultimate Frisbee all going on during a single night... If I'd had to choose just one or two to investigate, I would have been petrified!

But hosting will give me a chance to "shape the incoming class" - in other words, I get to show off how ridiculously psyched I am about Oberlin and the opportunities here. I'll get to shock and amuse high-school seniors with our all-gender bathroom and my SexCo exploits, and I can't wait. I'm signed up to host one student in October and one in November right now, but that'll change once I go down and sign up for more hosting. The $10 that the college pays us for hosting isn't why anyone does the overnights; it's a group of students who love the school and want to show off how excited we are about it. According to the group that organizes the overnights, being a host can also lead to a job with the admissions office as a tour guide. I shamelessly admit that I'm going for that; I think it would be a ton of fun to show people around the campus and help make that impression.

I can't wait.

The Consumer's Dilemma: Campus Dining and Groceries in Small-Town Ohio

I elaborated briefly on the whole "food" thing in my last post, but I feel like I should discuss it more in-depth as I explore the campus and town options.

Oberlin has two main dining halls, Stevenson and Dascomb. Stevenson is all-you-can-eat (although I haven't seen very many people doing the several-helpings thing), whereas Dascomb is set up for each person to get an entree, a few sides, and a drink. If you're curious about what sorts of food is served day-to-day, Campus Dining Services posts their menus online here.

 Dascomb has these fantastic booths a little outside the main dining area, which are great for spreading out to do homework on. I've seen many students doing just this: working on group projects over lunch, or doing problem sets, or writing papers. One of the things that I noticed the first time I was in Dascomb for a lunchtime break from studying is the amount of students who get their food in a take-out container: a reusable take-out container is given to a student, they get food to eat later, and the container is returned to Dascomb to be washed. The program seems really convenient - especially if you have a class or two that make it difficult to snag dinner at a reasonable time. I haven't tried it out yet, but I inevitably will. My schedule involves an evening intro economics class, and by the time I get out of the class, my brain is so fried all I want to do is go home and watch The Colbert Report. It'd be nice to have more than snack foods in my dorm at those times.

Stevie is larger, and, in my experience, louder. There's a few enclosed rooms where various special-interest groups have group meals at set times during the week. Off the top of my head, I know there's a French table, a Japanese table, a Spanish table... I believe there's also a time when Sci-Fi Hall has a group meal? The language tables function as a way for students to converse in the language in a less academic environment. The only experience I have  with this type of thing is at Japanese table, but I would assume it's pretty typical - a dozen students or so (sometimes more) bring their food in, hang out, and talk to everyone else. There's usually two or three teachers at the Japanese table to facilitate the conversation flow, which I really appreciate; it gives you a chance to get to know your professors outside of "that lady who gives me tests" as well as giving you a chance to ask about vocabulary.

Both halls offer some sort of vegetarian or vegan options, although this seems to translate into a whole lot of pasta and marinara sauce with salads for the vegans. The vegetarian options are a little more expansive - last night, I had eggplant parmagiana, and there's vegetarian pizza/pasta/other foods. They also both offer a salad bar, which is fairly extensive but doesn't seem to change that much (lettuce, spinach, bell peppers, onions, cheese, cucumbers, black beans, chickpeas, etc., with a few different dressings).

As I've mentioned before, I've had both awful and delicious food here. The other day for lunch, I had pierogies with spinach, onion, and sundried tomato, which were fantastic, and I've eaten some pretty darn good mac'n'cheese. However, I've also had "French onion" soup that tasted like vegetable stock with boiled onions, so the food isn't on one end of the spectrum all the time.

I do have to eat breakfast, though, and so today I walked out to the IGA supermarket a few minutes away from campus. The IGA is about ten minutes away by bicycle, but I walked with a non-bicycle-owning friend for the company today. Groceries in Oberlin can be obtained in a few places...

• The IGA. This is where I go for 90% of my groceries. It's a small-ish supermarket - at least, it seems small to this girl raised on suburban grocery stores - but it's also a locally-owned franchise. That alone is a good reason to put up with slightly higher prices than the Wal-Mart outside town, because the IGA puts more money back into the local Oberlin economy. They sell everything you would expect in a standard grocery store; although the produce section is much more limited than I'm used to, I'm pretty sure that's a function of being in small-town Ohio. This Seattle girl is used to trotting off to Uwajimaya for all my exotic fruit cravings. 
• The Wilder Decafe. This little room in the basement of Wilder (the student union that also hosts the campus Sexual Information Center, the mailroom, and other useful places) sells sandwiches and smoothies as part of Dining Services, but they also sell "groceries." This means a lot of prepared foods like Easy Mac, snack foods, and so on - although you can get milk and other groceries here, Decafe tends to be more expensive than biking out to the IGA. Milk (half a gallon) is $1.99 at IGA and $3.00 at Decafe; cereals are $4 or so - less on sale - at IGA and can get up to about $6.50 at Decafe. However, I can't deny the convenience of having a place to get stuff so close to my dorm. During the winter, I foresee fewer long hauls out to IGA and more popping into Decafe for instant oatmeal and soup.
• Wal-Mart. There's a superstore about fifteen minutes away from campus on bike that sells groceries, has a deli, and so on, so if you're feeling like a single trip to pick up popcorn along with your new movie and the TV to watch it on, I suppose this would be the place to go (although... I don't know why you would need a TV, really. I don't know anyone who owns a TV, given that we have access to one in the lounge with standard cable, and things like Dr. Who that require a special channel like BBC America have a big enough following that there's watching parties for the new episodes, so you don't have to pay for fancy TV. I digress). A large portion of the student body is pretty reluctant to go to Wally's for various moral/ethical reasons. I'm part of this faction. Although the prices are lower, I would prefer to give my money to the IGA. (Also, the ride/walk to IGA through tree-lined residential streets is nicer than the commercial district-then-three-lane-highway one out to Wal-Mart). 
• There's an Asian grocery called Kim's Market in town that also functions as a Korean restaurant, which I have yet to explore. According to rumor, the prepared food is pretty good, but the grocery store seems to be an "I'll take the best that I can get" situation to those of us who are used to Uwajimaya, H-Mart, Ranch 99, or all three within twenty minutes' drive.
• CVS. Apparently you can get groceries at the drugstore? There's a CVS a little outside the main two or three streets of "downtown" Oberlin. Assuming it's like other drugstores that I've been in, there's about two aisles of cereal and instant pasta - no fruit, and a paltry dairy selection. This is, however, not a 100% guarantee; I haven't been to CVS yet.

Today, on my IGA run, I found almost-ripe Comice pears in the produce, which means that in two days I will eat nothing but sugary, juicy, delicious pears. To give you an idea of prices in the IGA, my purchases totaled about $34. I purchased: three Comice pears, a pound of strawberries, five bananas, a half-gallon of milk, a tub of hummus, a box of Wheat Thins, three boxes of cereal, a half-gallon tub of generic chocolate ice cream, knockoff Nutella ("hazelnut chocolate spread"), and a package of cookies. I consider this to be a pretty good haul. It was certainly a pain to bring back; the price I paid for walking with a friend and talking the entire way was losing access to my bike baskets.

So what does that mean for my eating situation? I usually eat two meals in CDS - Dacomb and Stevie - and have breakfasts in my room with cold cereal, some strawberries or a banana, and coffee. Due to my busy schedule on certain days - between 9 AM and 10 PM on Wednesdays, I am out of class for a grand total of  five hours, spaced out into strange 90 minute/two hour breaks in which I frantically try to do readings, homework, studying, and eating at the same time - I occasionally wind up eating baby carrots, hummus, crackers, and cheese for dinner. It's been consistently about 75 to 80 degrees lately, but when it's colder I'm sure I'll begin craving soups and rice and pasta. I've asked my parents to go to H-Mart and buy microwaveable rice, prepackaged curry, and things like that for these times in a few months.

As for others' eating routines, there's a few ways to go. Almost all first-years are on either 19 or 14 meals a week. Many of them eat breakfast in CDS - pancakes, eggs, a rotation of pastries, etc. - but I know a few people who do the same thing I do. Older students can choose to reduce the number of meals they receive for a week in steps down to five meals a week, which seems to be what people do if they're living "off-campus" with a group of friends.

OSCA is the other big name in Oberlin food. It stands for Oberlin Student Cooperative Association; the individual sections of OSCA are called "co-ops." You can live in a co-op, as well, but a lot more students (650 or so, I believe) eat in a co-op. By pitching in to help cook, students can save money on meal plans (as far as I know, students in a co-op get one meal a week to be used in Stevie or Dascomb). People who live or eat in co-ops swear by them, although they are definitely not for everyone. Some of Oberlin's official student bloggers have written extensively about OSCA, both living and eating therein: The Mechanics of OSCA, On Being OSCA, Living in the Harkland, and many more under the "Dorms, Co-ops & Other Housing" section of the Oberlin blogs. OSCA reserves spots for first-years, so if you're big into knowing where your food is from, social responsibility and food, or making tofu, OSCA is a viable option. I don't feel qualified to elaborate on this further, not being a co-op resident/diner, but there's plenty of resources to find out about this. 

In Which I, like 75% of Blogwriters Everywhere, Apologize.

My blog is still in that awkward novelty stage, meaning that I think about it often but forget to write in it. I've now officially been on campus for twelve days, met my roommate, done orientation, and begun classes.

The last time I posted, I was antsy over the lack of roommate information; it's been solved by me getting placed into one of the first-year dorms, Dascomb Hall. It's not the newly-built, fancy dorms - we have cinderblock walls and carpet that looks like my high school history classroom's - but we do have a dining hall downstairs. Dascomb is also conveniently close to all of my classes, so I'll overlook the patched doors and dingy kitchens.

I asked to be placed into a first-year dorm because many people I had met over the course of the college-hunting process had extolled their virtues - meet people who are in the same situation as you! Easy friendships! Hall pride! I also asked to be placed into the "World Cultures" area of the dorm. I managed to get in, so I'm sharing dorm space with several international students from China, Taiwan, and other countries, as well as internationally-minded Americans. This has resulted in some theoretical hall activities - next week, we have our first hall thingy, a dumpling-making party - but for the most part, the hall is pretty quiet and people haven't been super-actively making friends. I suppose this is also a function of us being on the very end of the hall, beyond the stairs, so you can't just wander by on your way to the restroom/the floor kitchen/the laundry room.

My roommate, another girl from the Pacific Northwest, and I have sort of come to the mutual conclusion that we're decent roommates - i.e., we don't blast loud music when the other is trying to study; if one of our friends/family members Skypes, the other will either put in headphones or leave the room; we share milk for our morning bowls of sugar cereal - but aren't exactly "friends". We're pretty different people, because she's a sports player and is pretty gregarious, but we're respectful of the other and I don't see any major problems coming up over the course of the year.

As dorm rooms go, I consider us to be fairly lucky: we're on the second floor of the dorm, right next to the staircase. Our room is one of the corner rooms, so we have two windows (fantastic for the first few days when it was 90+) and a view of the main commons in front of the library. We also have an entire wall of storage, so there was actually enough room for me to store my sewing machine and sewing box under my bed and have room to spare for my stockpile of winter sweaters.  I would make curtains to replace the ineffective, impossible-to-lower blinds, but we're not allowed to have window coverings other than what the college gives us. I'm sure there's a good reason for this... but I can't see it. I would dearly love to be able to get dressed without having to sit in the blind spot on the head of my bed.

On the way of friends, though, placement into the World Cultures wing led me to meet a fantastic fellow ex-IBer and lover of all things nerdy. We've been eating together quite a bit (cafeterias are cafeterias no matter what grade you're in, and they're intimidating to sit alone in)... I've also made friends with the other first-year in my Japanese class, who is living in Asia House... I really want to live in Asia House next year, so I'm hoping she can put in a good word for me during the application process!

Orientation week turned out to be a little bit different from what I expected. The first few days, involving Moving Day, several presentations and plays about Oberlin life, and concerts were jam-packed and super busy. After those first few days, there wasn't as much scheduled, and so it felt pretty empty on campus while the older students moved in.

We attended both group advising sessions and individual sessions, meeting our academic advisers in the process. I asked for an adviser in the East Asian studies department, and wound up with a fantastic professor who is also my first-year seminar teacher. She's from Seattle, teaches Japanese history and languages, and is the campus coordinator-type person for the Associated Kyoto Program, which I'm planning on applying for junior year. The first time I went and talked to her, we spent more time discussing my hobbies (kimono!) and my big-picture plan for college than actually planning out classes - mostly because I knew what classes I wanted to get into and didn't really need assistance getting my first-semester schedule together. I'm planning on asking her if she'd be willing to be my adviser for the rest of my time here. I don't know how others' advisers are, but the advising department did an amazing job matching me with someone.

I got my schedule ironed out - a Japanese history course, my first-year seminar on the Tale of Genji, a Japanese language course, and an introductory economics class. I didn't plan on having such a humanities/Japan-focused first semester, but I managed to get into all of my first-choice classes. This, apparently, is pretty rare for a first-year, but I'm definitely not complaining. There's a lot of reading to do, but the readings are manageable.

One of the main reasons I applied to Oberlin was the well-known ExCo, or Experimental College, division. These classes are taught by students, and run the gamut from Korean and various academic courses to Fencing and Calvin & Hobbes. I applied for exactly one ExCo, called SexCo, that's run by the Sexual Information Center. The course is required for anyone who wants to work at the SIC (and I do) - but it's also notoriously difficult to get into because it's a course about sex, how our society views sex, and gender. This year, they received 200 applications or so, and I managed to get in, which made me so, so, so happy. I have my first session this Wednesday.

There's been several culinary adventures in the last two weeks, like the mock chicken a la king in the dining hall that congealed to the plate during one lunchtime and the perpetually-underdone legumes. I didn't come into college expecting food like I get at home (I'm spoiled by foodie parents and access to the International District), so aside from the gluey soy-and-mushroom thing and slightly crunchy chickpeas, I've been reasonably satisfied with food here. To clarify: I'm not a vegetarian. I enjoy chicken, bacon, and steak. However, I've been eating very little meat out here, which is partially out of a sense of trepidation due to bad experiences with cafeteria hamburgers elsewhere and partially because much of the vegetarian food is actually pretty decent. The dining hall where I eat lunch a good portion of the time, Dascomb, does this not-at-all-accurate-but-still-delicious "stir fry" station with veggies and rice and tofu. One of my "New College Resolutions" was to eat more healthy food, ironically enough,* and I do feel that I've been succeeding. There's access to quite a bit of vegetable-type stuff and reasonably healthy things along with unlimited ice cream and cake. Fruit is a little bit sketchier, so my roommate and I have taken to purchasing apples, bananas, and so on to keep in the room.

Meal plans are expensive, though, so I opted to go on 14-meals-per-week and eat breakfasts in my room. This is working out to roughly a half-gallon of milk a week and a constant rotation of cold cereals, which isn't too bad. I'm sure I'll get sick of it in about two weeks and start using my coffee pot to make instant oatmeal, but for now the cornflakes-and-yogurt option is going okay. From what I can tell, the dining hall breakfasts are pretty much the same every morning... fruit, cereal, sausage or vegan sausage, eggs. Sometimes they apparently have pancakes or waffles, and they've got bagels and stuff. I don't feel like I'm missing anything by not eating CDS breakfasts.

There's a lot more to talk about, in more detail here, so I'm going to start marking "Blog-writing" into my schedule the same way I do homework; in theory, this will make updates more regular.

*My other New College Resolution was to make good use of the fancy gym facilities, the pretty campus, and the flat land to get in shape. So far, my running shoes haven't seen the outside of my closet.

In Which I Discover My New Room

I admit that I'm pretty terrible about checking my e-mail - there's a reason that I set up my 'professional'/boring e-mail address to forward directly into my normal inbox. However, point is, the class of 2016 finally received their housing assignments!

I've been watching my friends figure out housing for months, and several of my friends have patiently listened to me rant about how much I just wanted to know already. I requested a room in a first-year dorm wing specifically for people from (or interested in) the world outside the US - I figured it would be more exciting and give my future roommate and I something to talk about, at least.

I have yet to talk with Future Roommate, so I don't know anything about her besides her name. What I do know is that I wound up in a corner room on the second floor, separated from the next room by the staircase... which will make moving in a bit easier because I won't have to move things around the hallway so much. According to Google Earth, I'll have a lovely view of a street and parking lot out one window.

My impending departure from my beloved lilac bedroom seems so much more real now.

What Am I Walking Into?

There's hundreds of books out there that promise to de-bunk the college admissions process - I would know, as I think half of them sat on my bookshelves at one point. I don't promise to do that. Instead, what I'm hoping is to offer up a view of what happens after you're admitted, you've sent in your deposit, and arrived on campus.

For some background knowledge: I'm Shannon, a curly-haired geek from Seattle. My parents have lived in the same house since before I was born; I moved about twelve feet partway through junior high into a different bedroom. I went to a reasonably-sized public school in the area, where I was an IB diploma student (about which I will speak at length if the subject is brought up), co-editor of the yearbook, and leader of a club or two. For my high school, I wasn't an overachiever, and my grades were nothing special. I willingly admit that I struggled with the stress that IB classes as well as my general schedule placed on me. However, I wound up getting accepted at a fantastic school that fell squarely into that "reach" category all those books talk about: Oberlin. 

Of course, the process of choosing a school to go to is complex, and there's a ton of resources out there to describe how to do that. As for myself, I received my acceptance letter to Oberlin and screamed out loud, frightening several of the parents waiting at the bus stop for their children. There wasn't a whole lot of questioning about where I wanted to go.

 I have to say I'm looking forward to living away from home, but that comes with the biggest footnote ever.  I've lived in a place where I got spectacular views of mountains just from driving down the freeway, and some of my biggest memories from childhood feature the Puget Sound. I love the Pacific Northwest with all my coffee-swilling, Dungeness-crab-catching, rain-soaked heart, and what I intend to do in this blog is discuss the adjustment that newly-minted college kids will have to go through when moving to a different part of the US for The College Experience.